By Anthony Schorling

Introduction

Google has become one of the world's tech giants over the past decade-plus, developing into more than just the reliable search engine that we all came to know and love. They now offer a wide variety of apps ranging from Google Docs, to Gmail, to a recent breakout app, Google Calendar.

According to a December 2021 article from Calendly, Google Calendar now has over more than 500 MILLION users! While the app has always been a high quality way of keeping track of upcoming events, the boost in virtual meetings due to the COVID-19 pandemic have made Google Calendar a necessity for many businesses. But with so many businesses now using the app, this bodes the question: are they wringing the towel dry and truly getting the most out of their Google Calendar usage?

If you're both a Zapier user and a Google Calendar user, and you haven't set up any automations between the two yet, there's definitely still some water in that towel. Google is one of the most automation-friendly platforms out there today, making the possibilities for how you can increase your business's efficiency extremely vast. Zapier has a large list of zap templates showing just that, and today we're going to take a look at a few of those that businesses might find most useful.

1. Add new Calendly events to your Google Calendar

Our favorite scheduling software makes a return!

Calendly is incredibly for booking meetings and it does have its own tab for scheduled events, but the two downsides to it are that users can't see it in a traditional calendar view, and any non-Calendly-scheduled events that you have schedule won't appear here. To remedy this, you can use this zap template to add Calendly bookings to your Google Calendar. This way, you have more organizational options of your events, as well as have them all located in one place for easy access.

2. Log new Google Calendar events in a Google Sheet

If you've ever been interested in logging all your meetings, past, present, and future, in one spot for easy viewing, this zap template is for you.

We've all had to dig through emails or scroll back through months in our calendars just to find out what date we last met with someone. While this obviously isn't the most difficult task (most of the time), it's time-consuming and frustrating to not have it at our fingertips. Having all of your scheduled events in a spreadsheet makes this process astronomically easier and faster.

This template can also be used in reverse order (creating a row in a Google Sheet as the trigger, and creating a Google Calendar event as the action). Advisors who schedule semi-annual review meetings or other scheduled-out meetings of the nature might find this very useful. You can view a separate zap template for this specific scenario here.

3. Create new tasks in Asana from Google Calendar events

If you're not familiar with it, Asana is a project management tool that helps businesses stay organized with the work they have to complete for their clients.

In this zap template, Zapier uses Google Calendar booking to create tasks in Asana. This is a pretty open-ended zap that can be expanded on to assign tasks to a specific team member or members, connect the task to a certain client, or create multiple tasks. This is a great way for Asana users to ensure that their pre-meeting tasks get taken care of, and that they have all the resources they need before logging onto a meeting. Scavenging for various files, links, and other resources while in the midst of a meeting can be pretty unavoidable with the unpredictable nature of calls, but taking advantage of this automation is productive in limiting that scavenging.

Like the previous example with Google Sheets, this is another zap template that can be reversed. If you'd like to see the template for creating a Google Calendar event based on the creation of a task in Asana, you can check it out here.

4. Start a time entry in Toggl when a Google Calendar event begins

This zap template is pretty straightforward and will definitely save you a few clicks.

Tracking your time during meetings is a very simple task, but also a very important one, and an easy one to forget as well. With this template, you can make sure that you're not making a habit of going over your allotted time on your meetings, and not have to carry the burden of remembering to start tracking your time as you prepare for your calls. Don't be ashamed if it's slipped your mind before, I promise you, we have all been there!

5. Share Google Calendar events to your Facebook page

Maybe you've got a webinar coming up, or maybe it's a big anniversary celebration. Either way, you want to make sure you let people know about it.

With this zap template, you can ensure that's taken care of without even navigating to Facebook. Upon the booking of an event, your meeting will automatically be shared as a post to your Facebook page. This is an example of a zap that can be specified to only run when certain event types appear. Obviously, most people don't want every single event on their calendar to be publicized on their Facebook page. To prevent this from happening, you can use the "Filter by Zapier" feature between steps 1 and 2 in this template. The filter can either catch an event and stop it if you don't want it shared, or let it pass and continue onto the final step of sharing it to Facebook, all depending on how you'd like it set up.

Conclusion

Remember, the aforementioned five zap templates are far from the only useful ones that Zapier has to offer. Even with a long list of possibilities, users can still find hundreds of ways to build their own Google Calendar zaps, or expand on the existing templates for more case-specific automations.

We know that building out your own zaps can be overwhelming to start and frustrating when they don't work as expected. Not to worry though - if you're not a tech-savvy, DIY type of person, schedule an intro call with us! We are certified Zapier Experts who specialize in building out automations, and we're happy to help you build yours.

Thanks for reading this edition of the Sphynx Automation blog series. If you enjoyed this post, please check out some of our other material at https://www.sphynxautomation.com/blog! There, you can also stay up-to-date with when we post by subscribing to our email list. We post twice a month about automation, Fintech, and other related topics.

You can expect our next post in early August, so be sure to check back then for more material!